Mrs. Saunders, Susan used to think, letting her thoughts wander as the old lady rambled on, was an unfortunately misplaced person.  She had none of the qualities of the great lady, nothing spiritual or mental with which to fend off the vacuity of old age.  As a girl, a bride, a young matron, she had not shown her lack so pitiably.  But now, at sixty-five, Mrs. Saunders had no character, no tastes, no opinions worth considering.  She liked to read the paper, she liked her flowers, although she took none of the actual care of them, and she liked to listen to music; there was a mechanical piano in her room, and Susan often heard the music downstairs at night, and pictured the old lady, reading in bed, calling to Miss Baker when a record approached its finish, and listening contentedly to selections from “Faust” and “Ernani,” and the “Chanson des Alpes.”  Mrs. Saunders would have been far happier as a member of the fairly well-to-do middle class.  She would have loved to shop with married daughters, sharply interrogating clerks as to the durability of shoes, and the weight of little underflannels; she would have been a good angel in the nurseries, as an unfailing authority when the new baby came, or hushing the less recent babies to sleep in tender old arms.  She would have been a judge of hot jellies, a critic of pastry.  But bound in this little aimless groove of dressmakers’ calls, and card-parties, she was quite out of her natural element.  It was not astonishing that, like Emily, she occasionally enjoyed an illness, and dispensed with the useless obligation of getting up and dressing herself at all!

Invitations, they were really commands, to the Browning dances were received early in December; Susan, dating her graceful little note of regret, was really shocked to notice the swift flight of the months.  December already!  And she had seemed to leave Hunter, Baxter & Hunter only last week.  Susan fell into a reverie over her writing, her eyes roving absently over the stretch of wooded hills below her window.  December—!  Nearly a year since Peter Coleman had sent her a circle of pearls, and she had precipitated the events that had ended their friendship.  It was a sore spot still, the memory; but Susan, more sore at herself for letting him mislead her than with him, burned to reestablish herself in his eyes as a woman of dignity and reserve, rather than to take revenge upon him for what was, she knew now, as much a part of him as his laughing eyes and his indomitable buoyancy.

The room in which she was writing was warm.  Furnace heat is not common in California, but, with a thousand other conveniences, the Saunders home had a furnace.  There were winter roses, somewhere near her, making the air sweet; the sunlight slanted in brightly across the wide couch where Emily was lying, teasing Susan between casual glances at her magazine.  A particularly gay week had left both girls feeling decidedly unwell.  Emily complained of headache and neuralgia; Susan had breakfasted on hot soda and water, her eyes felt heavy, her skin hot and dry and prickly.